rssNagl: We Can Pull This Afghanistan Thing Off
Monday, June 21, 2010 at 8:50 am
- 12 Comments
The president of the Center for a New American Security, John Nagl, has an op-ed in the New York Daily News arguing against despair for the Afghanistan war. “[I]t is possible over the next five years to build an Afghan government that can outperform the Taliban and an Afghan Army that can outfight it,” writes Nagl, a leading light of the theorist-practitioners of counterinsurgency. Why?
The war in Afghanistan is winnable for three reasons: because for the first time the coalition fighting there has the right strategy and the resources to begin to implement it, because the Taliban are losing their sanctuaries in Pakistan and because the Afghan government and the security forces are growing in capability and numbers. None of these trends is irreversible, and they are not in themselves determinants of victory. But they demonstrate that the war can be won if we display the kind of determination that defeating an insurgency requires.
It’s a decidedly big-picture op-ed. Nagl has much less to say on NATO’s prospects for reversing the insurgency’s gains in southern Afghanistan ahead of the July 2011 date for beginning a gradual transfer of security responsibilities to Afghan control — and correlative U.S. troop withdrawals. And he has less to say about the costs of the war, writing instead that success is a “vital national interest” and that counterinsurgency is hard and takes time. Will that persuade doubters?
Follow Spencer Ackerman on Twitter
12 Comments
Pingback posted June 21, 2010 @ 9:08 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by attackerman and Roy Mitsuoka, WashIndependent. WashIndependent said: Nagl: We Can Pull This Afghanistan Thing Off – http://bit.ly/bdZDVX [...]
Pingback posted June 21, 2010 @ 9:32 am
[...] Nagl: We Can Pull This Afghanistan Thing Off « The Washington … [...]
Pingback posted June 21, 2010 @ 10:25 am
[...] more here: Nagl: We Can Pull This Afghanistan Thing Off « The Washington … Share and [...]
Pingback posted June 21, 2010 @ 10:46 am
[...] Nagl: We Can Pull This Afghanistan Thing Off « The Washington … [...]
Pingback posted June 21, 2010 @ 2:03 pm
[...] Nagl: We Can Pull This Afghanistan Thing Off « The Washington … [...]
Pingback posted June 21, 2010 @ 2:30 pm
[...] Nagl: We Can Pull This Afghanistan Thing Off « The Washington … [...]
Comment posted June 21, 2010 @ 2:44 pm
2011 Withdrawal Date
This is a domestic political constraint that will probably not depend, one way or the other, on events in theater.
Costs of the war
This is a domestic economic constraint that will probably will depend on events coming out of the theater, namely, on applying the lessons learned in combat to radical transformation on the rest of the defense budget.
Vital national interest
President Obama articulated this on the moral plane as a “necessary war” initially. But, this has to be articulated going forward in terms of ending the proxy war in Afghanistan between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan directly, with implications for nuclear-armed Israel and nuclear-aspirant Iran. I would think that Russia, China, and the US would all share those interests.
Time
The nut of this is an understanding on the left of what SPRI calls “one-sided war”. They have a neutral-sounding vocabulary for describing “assertive, multi-national action” and “peace operations” that end up sounding like the same “light infantry” doctrine coming out of CNAS.
The domestic political challenge is dealing with a chicken-hawk right that thinks war is mostly destroying little brown people with overwhelming firepower and making money off the minerals. It is odd that the selectively pacifist left has not picked up on the fact that JSOC is the “Department of Peace” where peace is defined as freedom for little brown people from “one-sided war” driven by proxies, pirates, and brigands.
If we are going to be involved in a “long war”, we need to have an appreciation of it in popular culture that is something other than, say, the racism of the War in the Pacific or ideological passions of the War in Europe.
I do not think the Anglo-American defense and foreign policy elite — with their long history of “war for oil” and dedication to “petrodollars” and, for that matter, “opiates” at home and abroad can do that. What we really need to hear from are Islamic sects other than those propped-up by the oil companies and the CIA with their dedication to warfare as organized crime, tribalism, and crony capitalism.
Pingback posted June 21, 2010 @ 11:07 pm
[...] Nagl: We Can Pull This Afghanistan Thing Off « The Washington Independent [...]
Comment posted July 7, 2010 @ 10:01 am
Buy Cheap Football Jerseys from Sport Jersey's Store, Basketball Jerseys, NFL Jerseys,NHL Jerseys, NBA Jerseys,MLB Jerseys,Hockey Jerseys,Cheap NFL Jerseys,Wholesale NFL Jerseys
Cowboys cheap jerseys Steelers cheap jerseys Saints cheap jerseys Vikings cheap jerseys Raiders cheap jerseysYou may need Summer Equipment,Have a good summer holiday:Many kind of Brand Sunglsss ,Puma Shoes,Converse Shoes,Nike Shox Shoes .
Women's Air Max LTD on sale,Men's Air Max LTD Shoes was introduced in 2002,Nike Air Max 95 and Nike Basketball shoes are hot now,Nike Air Max 2009 retail for men and women,Nike running shoes and mbt shoes are the latest stock to hit our shores,with more boots shoes online,Our nike sneakers like Mens Shox NZ and Womens Shox NZ sale online.
Comment posted September 28, 2010 @ 11:15 am
This is a really good read for me.
Comment posted September 28, 2010 @ 12:47 pm
Youve got style, class, bravado. I mean it. Please keep it up because without the internet is definitely lacking in intelligence.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
